The World and Everything in It: July 20, 2026

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JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning!

Reflecting on a life spent alongside a Supreme Court Justice.

ALITO: Politico calls John Roberts and says, “We have Dobbs, and we’re going to print it.” And then Sam is stricken.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today: A special Legal Docket—a portrait of Martha-Ann Alito.

Also today, the Monday Moneybeat. Economist David Bahnsen is standing by.

And later, the World History Book: The role of faith in the American founding.

FEA: Who are we as a nation? Are we a Christian nation?

One scholar says the Founders left us a more complicated answer.

ROUGH: It’s Monday, July 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

ROUGH: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran latest » The U.S. is pounding Iran's Revolutionary Guard again, hitting back after Iran killed more American troops. An Iranian missile killed two US service members and left a third missing at their base in Jordan Friday. Sixteen Americans have now been killed since the war began.

Republican Congressman James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, remarked:

COMER: We have to respond when we have a peace agreement that they break, and we have American lives that were lost. We have to respond swiftly, and with full force.

Iran has torn up last month's ceasefire and is raining missiles on America's Gulf allies. In Kuwait, strikes hit a plant that supplies much of the country's drinking water. Gulf leaders accuse Tehran of war crimes.

President Trump says the end goal is clear, to ensure that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.

But not everyone thinks it's working. Democratic Senator Mark Warner told ABC's This Week:

WARNER: I do not believe anyone thinks we're gonna bomb Iran into submission. And I sure as heck don't believe that, short of troops on the ground, there's any meaningful path to get out that enrichment.

Tehran continues putting a chokehold on commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Mediators are still pushing to restart peace negotiations, but there’s no sign yet that Iran is ready to resume serious talks.

Russia sanctions bill » Russia unleashed another wave of attacks on Ukraine this week, pounding Kyiv and other cities with missiles, drones and bombs. At least six people were killed and dozens wounded, exposing Ukraine's shortage of American-made Patriot air defenses.

Now lawmakers in both parties are moving to pass sweeping new sanctions on Russia this week. Republican Congressman Michael McCaul:

MCCAUL: This bill not only punishes Russia and energy coming out of Russia, it also hurts Iran and it also hurts China. So I believe it's gonna pass this week.

The bill would hit countries that keep buying Russian oil and gas, like China and India, with tariffs of up to 100 percent. President Trump wants it to go further still, with tougher sanctions on Iran.

Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen:

SHAHEEN: We have 62 sponsors. We're ready to go. There's a lot of momentum behind this. This is a way to a fitting legacy for Lindsey Graham to get this bill passed.

The late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was the bill's driving force, right up until his death last week. A Senate vote could come within days.

Mamdani discusses arresting Netanyahu » New York City's mayor is weighing whether he can arrest the prime minister of Israel during a planned upcoming visit to the city. Socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani remarked over the weekend:

MAMDANI: We're not talking about a personal assessment of Benjamin Netanyahu. We're talking about the International Criminal Court and the fact that they have a warrant out for this prime minister's arrest.

Netanyahu plans to visit New York in September for the U.N. General Assembly.

The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, over what it said were possible war crimes in the war in Gaza.

But the United States has never recognized the authority of the court Mamdani is leaning on. Just last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions against the ICC, describing it as:

RUBIO: A global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited.

US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz says the city has zero authority to arrest a foreign head of state and called it political theater. Israeli officials have said much the same.

Netanyahu is unmoved, saying he will address the general assembly at UN headquarters in New York as planned.

World Cup final » Argentina on Sunday very nearly became the first team to win back-to-back World Cup titles since the 1960s, but Spain had other plans.

AUDIO: … his final touch of the game. He had the decisive touch as well. Spain, for the second time in their history, have won the World Cup!

Ferran Torres scored the only goal of the game.

President Trump presented the World Cup trophy to the Spanish national soccer team last night after the 1-to-nothing victory. The United States, of course, hosted many of the World Cup matches this year, including the final contest at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Box office » At the weekend box office, the new Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey debuted in first place with a big opening haul.

ODYSSEY TRAILER: After years of war … no one could stand between my men … and home. 

It pulled in an estimated $125 million dollars in its opening weekend, despite controversy over some casting decisions.

It is the first feature film shot entirely on 70mm IMAX film.

Disney’s live action remake of Moana finished a distant second with another $19 million, continuing to disappoint against its huge production budget.

I'm Kent Covington.

Coming up: Reflecting on a life spent with a Supreme Court Justice on Legal Docket. And later, the role of religion in America’s founding.

This is The World and Everything in It.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: It’s Monday the 20th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Legal Docket. Every Supreme Court justice has a public life. Few Americans know much about the spouses who share it.

My colleague Jenny recently sat down with Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel Alito. What began as a conversation about an official portrait became something even richer—a portrait of Martha-Ann herself.

ROUGH: Martha-Ann Alito was on a mission. As the wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, she knew the time had come to get his portrait painted.

MARTHA-ANN ALITO: It was after my father died. He died in July of 2012, so in the fall of 2013, I started thinking about it more and more…

…thinking about the fleeting nature of life, her husband’s career of public service, and his legacy.

A friend suggested an artist named Igor Babailov.

ALITO: Igor is amazing because he was born in Russia and was trained in the Russian Academy of Arts. From the age of 7 on, he was taken from his home to the academy. … Igor initially came to Canada … and then he wanted to become an American citizen, so he is a naturalized American citizen.

Babailov has painted public figures like Pope Benedict and baseball legend Reggie Jackson, politicians on both sides of the aisle, like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, as well as families, and even pets.

A Supreme Court justice doesn’t have to get a portrait done.

ALITO: It’s a preferred outcome. You’re a justice and you need to be remembered in posterity.

The portraits are traditionally painted while the justice is actively serving, but then hung in the hallways of the Supreme Court building after the justice has retired or died. Typically, the justice’s former clerks contribute money to cover the cost. Only a few former justices have never had a portrait done, like the intensely private Justice David Souter, who died last year.

Justice Alito is also a private and quiet man. He demurred to the portrait. But Martha-Ann knew its value. A great portrait would capture not only the visual image of Justice Alito, but his life story, too.

ALITO: By January, I just decided it was going to get done. I was going to be the first test case.

Babailov could paint her portrait, and if her husband liked it, Babailov could paint the justice. Or Sam, as you’ll hear Martha-Ann call him.

To paint a portrait, Babailov starts with an in-person session. He makes a bunch of sketches while his wife, Mary, takes photographs from different angles.

ALITO: Igor is very precise. He comes in and he gives you an hour where you need to be still.

Babailov then returns to his studio to finish his work. About a six-month process.

The portrait shows Martha-Ann standing in what he describes as a cross between a library and a church with a stone wall behind her.

ALITO: And he decided I always do this with my hands [clasps hands] so he decided he had to do my hands this way.

They’re clasped together in a calm and gentle manner, which Babailov described as almost like a prayer. She’s wearing a deep purple silk blouse and red velvet blazer. She chose her outfit, but many of the details in the painting were a surprise: A wonderful surprise.

She’s next to a bookshelf full of books. Martha-Ann’s father was an air traffic controller in the military, and to this day, she can identify an airplane in the sky simply by sound. Her mother was a librarian. So Martha-Ann grew up surrounded by books.

ALITO: So I was always in the library. And I was an only child. And when my father was overseas, I had to go from school to the library so I could be attended to.

Martha-Ann eventually became a librarian herself. The Peace Corps wanted to send her to St. Lucia to create a library focused on agriculture. But on the cusp of accepting, she had second thoughts. As a military kid, she had lived all over, places like the Azores, Texas, France, and Maine. She never felt like she had a home.

ALITO: I felt as though I were a child of the universe.

She started thinking about her ancestors who had settled in Newark, New Jersey. Ultimately, she took a job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office there. And that’s how she came to know a lawyer named Sam Alito.

Today, lawyers use computers to do most of their research. But in 1980, they needed books. Some of the lawyers came to the library more regularly than others.

ALITO: This one person kept coming in. And then one day, I’m taking information to another office, and they’re all gathered around this one person who has been coming into the library. And they said, you learned Russian this weekend, I hear. And I’m like, ding, ding, ding! This one is very smart!

She had always imagined a marriage full of rich, intellectual conversation. And also?

ALITO: That my future husband should have oval fingernails because I have squatty stubs. And this arm reaches over my shoulder to get a book. And there are oval fingernails.

The two married in 1985. In Babailov’s portrait of Martha-Ann, he painted a photo of the Alitos. A mini picture frame placed on one of the bookshelves near a Bible.

Babailov also incorporated irises and lilies into the work, two of Martha-Ann’s favorite flowers.

ALITO: I love lilies. Lilies are an indication of purity…

She also notes they’re a symbol of the trinity.

Martha-Ann remembers being drawn to the church even as a girl. Her mother was a Presbyterian and her father was Baptist. When Martha-Ann was two, the family moved to the Azores and regularly attended church. She loved Sunday school.

ALITO: And I couldn’t get enough of Jesus. … And then when we came back to the United States, we always went to a Sunday non-denominational chaplain led-church on the Air Force base in Texas.

Sometimes she attended a Latin mass with a family friend, or the Presbyterian church with her grandmother.

ALITO: It was just that it was such deep mystery. … The world is just so powerfully put together. And big. And interesting.

In fourth grade, her family moved to France where she and her mother toured the cathedrals. As the years passed, Martha-Ann felt drawn to Catholicism. Two years after she and Justice Alito married, she officially joined the church.

The Alitos have two kids, Philip and Laura.

Martha-Ann jokes she was never a young mother, but she was once the mother of young children. When her kids were little, she went on her first spiritual retreat. She spent a rainy weekend at the beach.

ALITO: I have no expectation of what I’m going to do on this retreat except be silent, be in a room, and have guidance.

One talk covered the Bible passage of Martha and Mary. Jesus comes to visit them, and Martha’s distracted with preparations while Mary sits at his feet.

ALITO: And I was stung by it because as a child, I was so proud of my name, Martha. Because it meant a homemaker … and that’s what I wanted to do. Because my mother worked. … I begged her to be home with milk and cookies. And I knew when I was older, I was going to be married and have children, and I was going to be Martha.

And she was. Strong. Decisive. Efficient. She had a blast doing very Martha things, like cooking an entire Italian dinner from scratch, to honor her Italian husband’s roots.

ALITO: I made the olive bread which I had to pit the olives in those days … Kalamata olives,. I made the arrabbiata sauce from scratch. I made the rolled-out pasta so that I could fill it with the artichokes and grated mozzarella and the spices. … He was very happy, my husband.

In his portrait, Babailov included a stained-glass window on the stone wall. The image in the glass is of Saint Martha. And inscribed on the stone wall next to that window? The words of Jesus from that famous Martha-Mary passage in Luke 10: …only one thing is necessary.

ALITO: I asked him to put that in French because I lived in France as a child. And I went back to school in my academic college years. And I just thought, it will make people think more if they have to look it up. … But they can see it’s Luke. He does put the scriptural annotation there.

Justice Alito was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006. Dealing with the intense pressure of being in the public eye became a daily reality for the Alitos. Martha-Ann’s strong personality has occasionally landed her in—as one friend put it—“trouble.”

But Martha-Ann says that over the years, she’s become more contemplative. Perhaps one example of that is her reaction to the leaked opinion during the 2021-2022 Supreme Court term. Justice Alito penned the majority decision in Dobbs versus Jackson, a case the public was watching closely. Dobbs held that the constitution does not confer a right to abortion. It overturned Roe versus Wade. Fifty-three days before the court announced its ruling, Politico published a draft it had obtained from an unrevealed source. Before it did so, Politico called the Supreme Court.

ALITO: Politico calls John Roberts and says we have Dobbs, and we’re going to print it. And Sam is stricken.

Martha-Ann was with her husband in his office. It was a Friday.

ALITO: And I said, Sam, first of all … it’s Friday afternoon. … They aren’t publishing it today, or tomorrow, or even on Sunday. And I said, I don’t know when they’ll publish it, but don’t sweat it, you know?

The Alitos were whisked away.

ALITO: I didn’t care if they hurt Sam or me. I really didn’t care. All I cared about was my two children and how they were going to have to deal with this.

Martha-Ann keeps her portrait tucked away upstairs at home. But it convinced her husband. And a few years later, Babailov painted Justice Alito. His portrait was unveiled at a ceremony with his law clerks in 2021. Babailov placed Justice Alito in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court. The marble floor and pillars in the wide open space created a background full of light.

Here’s Babailov:

BABAILOV: It’s very strong and monumental. … You know the expression simplicity is genius? … You see there is this incredible, grandiose space of the Great Hall. And it makes you think: A great man in a great hall.

Just like in Martha-Ann’s portrait, Babailov painted Justice Alito standing, instead of seated. A crowd of people gather in the background.

BABAILOV: He’s like one of those pillars. … He’s the person of the people. … Because that’s what Supreme Court justices do. …They represent the … American people … and of course the Constitution, which is like … it defends the rights of the people. It’s not designed for the elite. It’s designed for the common person.

Of Martha-Ann’s portrait, Babailov says this:

BABAILOV: Martha-Ann is a very incredible woman, if you know [laughs]. … Everything is taken into consideration when you capture a person … her background, her professional background, her faith … the little tilt of her head.

Of course, no portrait can capture every detail. I loved learning that Martha-Ann drives a convertible and used to play lacrosse. She recently returned from a pilgrimage in Poland. She says if she ever disappears, it’ll be to Zakopane, a mountain town she describes as traditional and where there’s never an empty seat in the church.

But no matter where she is, she’s reminded to look at the one necessary thing.

ALITO: God always provides for you. He always provides for you.

For now, the Alitos remain in Washington, D.C. The justice’s portrait hangs in his office. Someday it will join the others in the Supreme Court hallways. Her portrait is still in the Alito’s home, quietly telling the story behind his.

That’s this week’s Legal Docket.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

The Monday Moneybeat

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group, and he’s here now. David, good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: So, Dividend Cafe this week, you make the point that everyday investors may be far more exposed to the AI boom than maybe they realize, simply because so much of the S&P 500 is now concentrated in a really small number of technology and semiconductor companies.

Now I see in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over the weekend they are reporting that a freely available Chinese AI model appears to have narrowed the gap with leading American systems. According to the Journal, the news has added some fuel to the sell-off in chip stocks.

But the deeper question isn’t simply whether AI succeeds or fails, right? It’s who makes money, where in the chain do they make it, and how durable those profits prove to be.

So what does it actually mean for an investor to be “invested in AI”?

BAHNSEN: There’s so much to unpack there because it’s a multitude of things that I don’t believe very many investors are really thinking through.

Let’s just say that the returns from AI do not come in the way people think, or as quickly, or as much. Then you have some of the companies that need an ROI on their big investment that are vulnerable and heavily exposed.

But let’s say the returns do come, and then it brings in even more competition—whether it’s foreign, global, Chinese, or just within the U.S. You already see some of that. What does that do? It inevitably puts downward pressure on margins. Companies are competing for something that’s really generating a high ROI, so then you end up competing over price. That, of course, puts downward pressure on the expectations people have for a lot of the companies that right now are priced on very fat margins.

I think, Nick, there’s an expression I want to suggest for Moneybeat listeners that we get out of our lexicon forever, which is this very broad and vanilla and totally unhelpful term: “those invested in AI.”

What does it mean to be invested in AI?

A lot of people are going to make money being invested in AI if AI fails, because the investment they made money on was all the people putting money into the cap-ex of AI with the pick-and-shovel companies—the ones making the chips and the compute capacity and cloud infrastructure.

Things could fail, and those companies made money. As long as investors exit before all that blows up, they can make money.

But here’s the problem: that’s not what people are referring to. They’re not referring to making something and then having it just sort of sit there. It’s the ongoing utility of AI. That’s what we’re talking about when we say, “being invested in AI.”

So to me, I look at it like this: How is WORLD going to make money from AI? How is the Bahnsen Group going to make money from AI? How are McDonald’s and Walmart going to make money from AI?

That’s the entire issue here for people who understand economics: a new tool that, once it’s built out, has greater efficiencies, drives greater productivity, and enhances the production of goods and services in the real economy.

Nobody is talking about AI in that sense—the end user. We’re all focused on the bottleneck up at the top: either semiconductors or hyperscalers or AI labs making the large-language models.

I’m sorry. Until people get past that discussion into the real-world discussion, everything else is still very speculative and very uncertain as to who the winners and losers will be.

I’m perfectly fine with someone saying, “I think this whole thing is going to be really successful and transformative and make a lot of money for a lot of people.” That’s fine.

But to say that with any specificity for an investor about which companies, in what sequence, and in what model—I think that’s the part that is just never discussed, and it’s bothering me immensely.

EICHER: Let’s stay on the real-world use of AI.

The fear, of course, is that businesses will deploy it to gain efficiencies by eliminating jobs. But the evidence you cite so far points the other way.

What do those numbers tell us—and why are you not persuaded that this time technology will permanently destroy more jobs than it creates?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, so far. And I’m also saying that there is substantial evidence of the opposite.

For the companies that are the most widely used adopters of AI, they have a 12% increase in entry-level positions and a total increase of about 10%. Those that are considered low or no adoption with AI are somewhere around 0% job growth.

So there is at least something on the front end of AI adoption requiring new hiring. We already know there’s a significant increase in software engineer hires. That’s counterintuitive to some people who are going around saying we’re not going to need software engineers anymore because AI is going to do it all for us, when in fact companies are hiring a lot more software engineers.

There’s going to be adaptation. There’s going to be training. There are going to be workflow shifts, process changes, all of this type of stuff. But there’s also clearly just entry-level jobs that are being hired now.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, Nick. I’m totally open to the idea that there will end up being job loss. Already, over the years—even pre-AI—automation led to certain job loss on a gross basis, meaning some fewer jobs. But then on a net basis, it opened up new opportunities.

That’s always been my base case here because there’s no precedent where that hasn’t happened in history.

There are some who say this time it’s different—that this time AI is not only going to do more things, but then it will not allow for new hiring as new needs come about. I have a very hard time getting there because of what I believe about human nature.

I think human beings are constantly growing in their needs and wants. Therefore, there’s an insatiable need for work to fill those needs and wants.

EICHER: I want to leave AI but stay on the jobs market. Because I read in The Wall Street Journal that nearly 2 million Americans have been looking without success for work for at least six months, and that figure is near the highest level since late 2021.

That sounds ominous. But at the same time, overall unemployment is still relatively low, so how much weight should we put on that number—and what may explain it?

BAHNSEN: Well, it’s still a very low number in the context of total unemployment.

There are more people who are long-term unemployed, and I’ll make a comment in a moment as to where that usually comes from. But that number becomes very problematic when it’s in the context of a rising unemployment rate, because then you have a lack of jobs and a lot of people looking for work at a time when there’s a lot of people who have been looking for work for a long time and not finding it.

You don’t see all of those things together. That’s a recessionary condition.

But here it’s more an outlier—a subset within what’s a reasonably low unemployment number—that there is a slightly higher amount of people who have been unemployed for some time.

It’s tough for economists to unpack because you don’t know what those who say they’ve been looking for work for a long time have done or are willing to do. When the weekly unemployment claims are not going higher, it isn’t because there’s a lot of firing going on.

So is there a segment of the population that is maybe stuck with obsolete skills? Or in an age stage that is just more difficult on a micro level—the individuals who find themselves in those situations?

I think back to things I’ve studied from the early ’90s, when the defense and aerospace industry had substantial layoffs. There were people who, for 30 years, were quite skilled in certain types of work, and the work they did was just not needed anymore and wasn’t coming back.

To go tell them at age 59 to go learn a new skilled trade—I can’t even imagine what that must have been like.

I don’t think we have a ton of that, but I’m positive we have some.

From a macroeconomic standpoint, though, that becomes a much bigger concern when it’s in the context of rising unemployment, which right now it’s not.

EICHER: Let’s end on an up-note, the apparent boom in new-business formation.

The New York Times reports a record 5.7 million applications to start businesses last year, with roughly half a million new firms actually formed.

Many may remain tiny and never create big numbers of jobs, or fail. Is that enough to discount the trend—or does the rise in entrepreneurship genuinely cheer you?

BAHNSEN: No, it does cheer me.

I wrote about it in Dividend Cafe this Friday. A 30% increase in business formation—that is largely... there are an awful lot of AI startups or AI-adjacent startups in there. I’ve written about it in recent weeks in the small-business data because, on one hand, I love seeing new business formation.

There are an awful lot that don’t make it, never get off the ground, and are sort of hobby-type businesses. There’s always been that, though. So the numbers are relevant in the sense that they’re relative to one another—that there’s a sequential growth in this that has been substantial.

Now, I don’t get particularly excited about all of them because somebody starting a little business to incubate themselves by walking around putting up Instagram reels of themselves eating lunch doesn’t excite me very much.

But that other people are trying to give it a shot in the small-business world—that does.

You’re right. It may not be a big hiring phenomenon, but I feel very strongly about entrepreneurialism. I do think that in the AI and tech sector, this is allowing certain people who aren’t going to get hired at big tech companies to go out and try something, whether it’s in coding or programming or the enterprise or facilitating services.

There’s a lot of need out there.

So the data is encouraging. That doesn’t mean everyone is going to make it. That’s part of celebrating entrepreneurialism—is celebrating risk-taking.

Once you get through some of the froth in the data, you still get a number that is on the rise.

That’s a good thing.

EICHER: All right. David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group.

You can read him every week at Dividend Cafe. You can sign up for it, read it, or both at dividendcafe.com.

David, thanks so much. We’ll see you next week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: Faith and the Founding.

Today, many Americans are split about whether the country was founded as a Christian nation. But some historians argue that’s the wrong kind of question to ask about our complicated political history.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher has the story.

EMMA EICHER: In September of 1774, the first Continental Congress began the opening session in Philadelphia.

And the first act was prayer.

JOHN FEA: Jacob Duché, the Anglican minister of Christ Church came to Carpenter's Hall and prayed for the Continental Congress.

That’s John Fea, an American historian who’s written extensively on religion and the Founding. He says prayer was important in the early days of American politics.

FEA: The founders were mostly united on the idea that religion, not Christianity particularly, but religion, which is the way they phrased it, was very useful for creating republican citizens.

On July 20th, 1775, Congress proposed its first spiritual proclamation. They set aside a national day of fasting to pray for wisdom for King George III, and for peace between England and the colonies. When the Revolution started, they announced similar days about once a year.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln called for a day of fasting and prayer on March 30th, 1863.

Today, advocates for a Christian Founding point to these historical examples. But Fea says the roles of religion and morality are much more nuanced than people might think. The Founders had a complex view of religion within government.

FEA: Religion was important; they understood religion as an important dimension of building a republic. On the other hand, you will also find places where they clearly want to keep religion and state separate, like the First Amendment, the disestablishment clause, or they see the events of the American Revolution unfolding in a kind of political way rather than in a necessarily primarily Christian way.

And most of the Founders were diverse in their beliefs.

FEA: Thomas Jefferson would have rejected the divinity of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and so forth. And then all the way on the other side, you have someone like John Witherspoon who might feel comfortable today worshiping in like an evangelical congregation.

Fea says for the majority of America’s history, people didn’t debate about whether the Founding was Christian, because they took it as fact.

FEA: Most Americans believed that they were living in a Christian nation. That doesn't necessarily mean they were right in believing that, or wrong in believing that, or they were interpreting the Founding correctly. They just saw themselves as living in a nation that was demographically Christian and defined in many ways by Christian culture.

That view started to change in the 1960s …

KIDS PRAYING: Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee, and we pray God’s blessings on us, on our parents, on our teachers, and our country. Amen.

… especially after the Supreme Court ruling in Engel versus Vitale.

[NEWSCASTER]: That is the way the prayer was recited until June 25, 1962, when a 6-1 decision of the United States Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional.

Shifting perspectives continued into the ‘70s:

WALTER CRONKITE: In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions. Thus the anti-abortion laws of 46 states were rendered unconstitutional.

Fea also cited the 1965 immigration law that allowed new immigrants from non-Western countries to enter the United States, diversifying the religious population.

FEA: All of these things created a perfect storm, if you will, that made people wonder. Who are we as a nation? Are we a Christian nation?

Fea says the answer to that is complicated.

America has had a national day of prayer since 1952. Two years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower added the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. A Catholic group initially lobbied for it, but it was also used as a way to assert the moral authority of the United States over the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Eisenhower also made “In God We Trust” the United States’ official motto. And for more than 200 years, the government has distributed Bibles and New Testaments to all military troops.

These events can trace their roots back to the Founding, and how religion was understood to play an important role.

FEA: John Adams famously said that the United States Constitution was built for a moral and religious people. If John Adams was right, then we need to be thinking about the role that our faith might play in public life. As we live in the 21st century, I think it's something to remember. What does it mean to be moral? What does it mean to be religious?

And as laws, culture and values continue to change the country, those questions remain worth asking.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Tomorrow: the Trump Administration confronts left-wing terrorism. We’ll have a report. And, how one woman turned her own grief into a ministry for bereaved mothers. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment! At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter.” —2 Corinthians 7:10–11

Go now in grace and peace.

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